Killer Triggers

by Joe Kenda

  At first, we couldn’t find any sign of forced entry, but our crime scene team did find a screen pulled off an open rear window to the house. There were footprints in the dirt under it. They photographed them and made molds for evidence.

  While I was taking note of all this, my guys reported that Mrs. Limbrick’s car was nowhere to be found. We’d been told she usually parked it in the garage, but it was not there.

  I had my guys put out a bulletin on the missing car and its license plate number, notifying all law enforcement agencies in the state and region that we were looking for the vehicle.

  We were also looking for the husband, Charles Limbrick senior, whom we hadn’t been able to reach. A neighbor gave us the name of the trucking company he drove for, and we had them track him down for us. He was eight hundred miles away, which is the start of a good alibi, but we needed to check it out, certainly.

  We’d picked up some rumors that the Limbricks were having marital difficulties, and there were even reports of an affair—or two. Nobody had any names or eyewitness accounts of strangers showing up late at night when Charles was on the road. So we took notes and filed them in our brains for future reference.

  Charles senior was on our list of potential suspects, especially after a neighbor told us he’d been talking about buying a handgun, ostensibly for his wife’s protection while he was on the road.

  Being interested in buying a gun for your wife doesn’t make you a killer, but it kept him high on the list of people we wanted to talk to. The annals of crime over the centuries certainly contain cases in which a jealous or wandering husband shoots his wife and then tries to make it look like a burglary gone bad.

  If a guy was looking to kill his wife and put a lot of miles between the murder scene and himself, a veteran long-haul trucker would know how to put the pedal to the metal and skedaddle.

  a cool customer

  Once we’d checked on the whereabouts of the victim’s husband and completed the preliminary search of the home and the victim, I turned to interviewing the teenage son, who had called us after discovering her body in their home.

  Charles Limbrick Jr., known as “Chuck” or “Chuckie” to family and friends, was widely hailed as a promising young musician and singer. He was charismatic and popular, according to neighbors and classmates we had interviewed along their street.

  I told my guys to keep that in mind when we talked to him the first time. After finding him asleep on the porch after his mother’s murder, I wasn’t impressed. But maybe I had him wrong.

  People respond to tragedy in different ways. Teenagers are strange even in normal situations. All those raging hormones and unwired brain paths can result in odd behavior. So I cut him some slack, figuring he’d been through a horrific situation—one of the worst I could imagine.

  “Chuck, I know this is a horrible time for you, and I’m sorry for this interruption, but I’m leading this investigation,” I said. “We want to find the person who did this and bring him to justice. So I need you to tell me how you found your mother.”

  He’d been crying and tried to gather himself, but he sputtered only a few words out before he choked up. He took a minute, then offered a quick summary of the day’s events.

  Chuck and his friend Chris had met after school and gone to the Citadel Mall. They left there and went to Chuck’s home, but it was locked up. They went to the home of a neighbor, Bill Robinson, who kept an extra key to their house for just such occasions.

  The buddy, Chris, had stayed outside with Robinson when Chuck went back and opened the front door to the house. Chuck said he found his mother dead and called for his neighbor and his friend to come in the house.

  The kid lost it at that point. We didn’t push him. There would be time to dig into his story later. I thought it sounded a little too pat.

  My initial opinion of him was confirmed by his response when I expressed sympathy over his mother’s death.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Yeah? Oh, my, you are a cold fish, choirboy.

  That didn’t seem like a really heartfelt response.

  There is an expression in law enforcement represented by the initialism JDLR. “Just Doesn’t Look Right.” This was one of those JDLR situations.

  hitting the target

  With the on-the-road husband ruled out, our investigation was going nowhere fast, but then some more welcome automotive news arose.

  One of our patrol units called in, reporting they had found the victim’s car just two miles from the Limbrick home.

  Thanks, I needed that.

  I headed to its location, outside a Target store in a shopping center parking lot. Our crime scene team went over it, looking for fingerprints, traces of blood, a weapon—anything that might help us identify the suspect, who, we assumed, stole it and drove it to this spot.

  They turned up nothing to help the case, but just the location of the car interested me. Why would the killer drive it only a couple of miles before ditching it? Why take it at all if that was as far as you wanted to go?

  Now, maybe the killer had another car, the proverbial getaway car, parked at the Target store. Or maybe our suspect stole another car there and took off. But stealing the car after murdering its owner seemed a risky move. If someone had seen the driver in the car, it would link that person directly to the murder. Why take that risk?

  I couldn’t come up with many good reasons for heading to Target after committing a murder. Then again, I can’t think of many good reasons for going shopping. I’m not a shopper. I do my hunting and gathering on the job.

  The car’s location was an odd twist in the case. We followed it up by canvassing employees and assorted mall rats in hopes of finding someone who had seen the driver park it.

  Back then security cameras weren’t everywhere as they are today. If this had happened in more recent times, we probably could have found some footage of the car and driver traveling between the murder scene and the Target parking lot.

  The widespread use of security cameras has been a boon to law enforcement in that regard. I know that people complain about privacy violations, but my response is, “If you don’t break any laws, why would you worry?”

  Checking security cameras would be one hell of a lot easier than trying to find someone who had seen a single car pull into a three-thousand-space parking lot a day or two earlier. It would have been helpful if Mrs. Limbrick had owned a cherry-red Maserati or even a zebra-striped Ford Explorer—something that stood out from all the other vehicles.

  But she didn’t. She drove a typical working-mom car, a 1976 Buick Limited. Four-door, white top, blue body. A General Motors generic car. They probably sold a couple hundred thousand of them. And millions of others that looked just like them.

  We turned up a few regulars who had noticed her hardly noticeable car because they parked nearby, but they all had different timelines of when it showed up.

  This is why many detectives go bald from tearing out their hair. Fortunately for my own locks, I was more of a nail biter. Real nails. Steel. I chew ’em and spit out bullets.

  My dentist loved it, by the way. The cost of my broken molars put his kids through college.

  let’s hear it for nosy neighbors

  We had hit another dry pothole, so to speak, with Betty Jean’s car. When an investigation is headed nowhere, I like to go back to the scene of the crime and take a fresh look. We knocked on more doors, hoping to find someone who might not have been home on our first neighborhood canvass. It’s low-tech, shoe-leather-and-sore-knuckles police work, but sometimes there’s a big payoff.

  This was one of those times.

  “Hey, Sergeant Kenda, you’re gonna like this. I’m at the house across the street from the Limbricks’, and a juvenile female here says she’s got some info on the case.”

  I love it when that happens.

  Le
t’s call her Nikki DeVecchio. My new favorite gum-chewing teenybopper of the moment said that when she was coming home from school on the day of the murder, she’d seen Betty Jean’s car driving by. She knew Chuck and his mom, and she knew the car.

  “I was expecting to see Mrs. Limbrick in the car, but instead I saw Chuck driving,” she told me. “I couldn’t see who the passenger was, but I definitely saw Chuckie.”

  Well, well, well, isn’t that interesting!

  Neither Chuck nor his friend Chris had mentioned going for a drive in her car before—or after—finding the victim. And Chuck wasn’t old enough to drive.

  With a little polite prompting, Nikki added that Chuck and his mother argued a lot, and Chuck had talked about running away, many times. She said she’d often smelled beer on his breath, and while he was drinking, she had heard him talk about hating his mom.

  “One time, I playfully punched him on the arm, and he got mad. He told me to never hit him again,” Nikki said. “Then he told me, ‘My mom hit me once, and she’ll never do that again, either.’ ”

  The helpful neighbor added that Chuck’s pal, Chris Marrow, was in her eighth-grade history class and had a bad reputation.

  “He gets in trouble a lot, and I think he’s been arrested,” she said.

  We hadn’t gotten around to checking young Marrow’s name in juvenile records, but after our talk with Nikki D., it seemed like a good idea.

  As it turned out, Nikki was right.

  the wingman

  Our initial interview with Chuck Limbrick’s sidekick hadn’t given us any answers and, in fact, raised more than a few questions. Chris Marrow had given us the same pat description of events on the day of the murder.

  All you true-crime fans out there know what I was thinking. It’s very rare for two witnesses to offer exactly the same account of an event, even if they were together. Unless they’ve gone over their stories and practiced them for some reason—and it usually isn’t a good reason.

  We had also learned that Marrow wasn’t just a bad boy poseur pretending to be Fonzie Fonzarelli. Just recently, he’d been caught up in an auto-theft investigation. Our guys had arrested him, and under questioning, he’d given up the names of some key players. It wasn’t exactly grand theft auto—more like joyriding—so he walked away without any charges after cooperating.

  We liked that Limbrick’s buddy had been helpful to a past police investigation. That gave us hope in a dark and cold world. We always looked forward to talking to a known thief who didn’t mind throwing a friend or coworker under the bus. This was our kind of guy.

  Mr. Marrow had some explaining to do. He wasn’t a suspect in the murder (yet), but I suspected that he had lied to me in our first conversation at the Limbrick home—or at least omitted the fact that he’d been joyriding in Betty Jean’s car. But maybe he didn’t think that was important. I intended to set him straight on that point and probably many others.

  It’s always helpful to talk with friends and family before directly confronting a key witness or suspect. You want to know as much about them as possible. So I paid his parents a visit.

  I chatted up Mr. Marrow for several minutes, discussing his son’s previous run-ins with our department, his school activities, and his overall attitude.

  Then I popped a more critical question: “Mr. Marrow, do you own a handgun?”

  “Oh, yeah, I do,” he said.

  “Would you mind bringing it to me now?” I asked, though it was really more of a demand, which is one of the things we in law enforcement are allowed to do.

  The father left the room, went up the stairs, and, I presume, rummaged through his sock drawer looking for his pistol. Then he returned empty-handed, with a worried look on his face.

  “I can’t find it,” he said. “It’s not where I always keep it.”

  He seemed genuinely frazzled.

  I asked to see his paperwork on the gun. He produced the documentation and made my day. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 19 .357 Magnum revolver with a six-inch barrel.

  As you may recall, dear reader, the slugs found at the Limbrick home were also from a .357 Magnum pistol. We also asked Mr. Marrow if he had a box of ammunition for the gun and if that was missing, too.

  Yes, and yes, he said.

  Our crime scene guys had found a box of cartridges for a .357 Magnum pistol in Chuckie’s bedroom.

  With those revelations, my detective brain began whirling with all that I’d learned about the teenage Marrow. He was a close friend of Chuckie Limbrick and a frequent visitor to the family home.

  He’d been at the murder scene when the body was recovered. He had previous encounters with our department, and access to a pistol that matched the murder weapon.

  “Mr. Marrow, I’d like to talk to your son again,” I said. “Now.”

  You can imagine how the father took that request.

  “Why? Do you suspect he was involved in the murder of Mrs. Limbrick? With my gun? That couldn’t be true! Maybe we should call a lawyer now?”

  They seemed like nice people, so I didn’t shoot them.

  Just kidding.

  I mean, about the shooting them part.

  “I’m not saying Chris is a suspect at this time,” I said. “I simply have a few questions for him, and you can sit here while I ask them.”

  Mr. Marrow had his son come down from his room.

  The teen did not look thrilled to see me.

  “Chris, I have a few more questions for you regarding Mrs. Limbrick’s killing. I want you to think hard and give me your best, honest recollections of that day. Okay?”

  A sullen teenage nod was all I got in reply.

  “So take me through the day, step-by-step after you arrived at Chuck’s house.”

  He spewed the same story pretty much on the mark. The kid came to class prepared, I gave him that. He was a well-schooled liar. And I am a well-schooled lie detector.

  While he was reciting his web of lies, I gave him a reappraisal, figuring out how to crack this nut. Then I noticed his shoes, and it clicked. We found footprints under the window used to enter the Limbrick home.

  “Those are pretty nice shoes you got there, Chris. Let me see them, please.”

  He sullenly extended his leg and gave me a profile of his kicks.

  “No, take off that shoe.”

  “I don’t want to take off my shoe,” he said.

  Wrong answer.

  “Either you take it off, son, or I’ll take it off.”

  Chris saw the light. He took off the sneaker and handed it to me.

  I turned it over and examined the tread. Actually, I only pretended to examine it, because I had no idea what our footprint from the crime scene looked like. I hadn’t committed it to memory. But I wanted the kid to think I was Sherlock Holmesing his ass.

  I didn’t say anything. I studied the shoe. He studied me.

  “Wouldn’t you find it strange if your shoe’s tread matches the one we found under a window at the Limbrick house—the same window the killer used to enter the house?”

  “A lot of people have these same shoes,” he said.

  Obviously, the kid had already given this some thought.

  “True, a lot of people have this shoe, but then, so do you, Chris. And you were there on the day Mrs. Limbrick was murdered.”

  That rattled his cage. His hands trembled. His legs danced.

  Chris had cracked in the car theft case, and he was about to crack again because he knew he was in over his head on a murder case.

  child’s play

  There are approaches for interrogating juveniles and certain adult suspects who are not hardened criminals with nothing to lose. With them, you don’t go for the jugular right off. You don’t make “punishment” comments like, “Unless you tell me the truth, you are going to prison for the rest of y
our fucking life, and most of your afterlife, too!”

  That doesn’t work so well with the younger, softer suspects, because it either makes them start sobbing or makes their parents end the conversation with a call to their lawyer.

  I taught my guys to use a more indirect approach in these cases. You come across more like the family’s pastor than like a hard-ass cop. You build rapport with the kid and the parents so there is a certain level of comfort. You position yourself as someone who wants to help them get to the truth and relieve them of any guilt they might be carrying.

  You keep them a little off balance so they lose focus, drop their guard, and make mistakes. Then you pounce on their ass. Chris was in his own home with his parents present. He liked to think he was a tough guy, but tough guys don’t still live with Mom and Dad.

  Nearly everyone involved in a murder wants to be understood and forgiven, even if they don’t regret it. The difference between a detective like me and a priest is that I don’t forgive and I don’t forget. But I would use that need for understanding and forgiveness to extract the truth, and I encouraged the detectives who worked for me to do the same.

  We actually take classes in this stuff, by the way. We don’t just make it up as we go. Still, it is a complicated procedure and it doesn’t always work. But when it does, you feel a real sense of accomplishment.

  Confessions are relatively rare, especially if you’re dealing with hard-nosed criminals, alcoholics, drug abusers, and sociopaths. Even so, veteran interrogators will tell you that if you spend enough time with your subject, you can figure out which buttons to push.

  A veteran CIA interrogator once said, “I don’t believe in torture, because it doesn’t work, and I don’t need it. Given enough time, I can get in someone’s head and get everything I need from them.”

  My next question to the teenager was one taught in interrogation classes for law enforcement. The approach differs for each individual, or at least each type of individual. Chris had been in some trouble, but he was from a good family and he still had a conscience. He was mostly scared to tell the truth. After what he’d seen, he had good reason to be scared.